Liz Figueroa is a Democratic state senator from Fremont, a Silicon Valley town just across the bay from Google's headquarters in Mountain View. She doesn't like Google's Gmail much at all, saying that its ad-supported free email feature violates customers' "expectation of privacy." See her press release: http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/servlet/gov.ca.senate.democrats.pub.members.memDisplayPress?district=sd10&ID=2087 But if you take Figueroa's complaints on their own terms, she may be more guilty of violating Internet users' privacy than Google. Figueroa's web site solicits feedback in a form that asks for personal information including home address and email address -- but it includes no privacy policy: http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/senator/figueroa/ So she and her staff can do whatever they want with the information and other data, such as IP address, available through the server's web logs. Gmail, on the other hand, is a far better Internet citizen: it has a detailed privacy policy and terms of service agreement specifying what Google can and can't do: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.html Figueroa happens to be the same politician that US PIRG calls a "privacy champion," and that Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has "commended": http://www.pirg.org/consumer/pdfs/fcrarelease30sept.pdf http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/outsourcing-privacy.htm These same pro-regulatory activists have denounced companies for not having adequate privacy policies. A report from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse complains that one-third of commercial websites "post no privacy policies at all," a supposedly "dismal" finding: http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/emperor.htm Anyone think Privacy Rights Clearinghouse will denounce Figueroa too? At the federal level, Figueroa's conduct would be verboten. A 2000 OMB policy requires all federal agencies to publish clear privacy policies on their web sites and comply with them: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m00-13.html Perhaps Figueroa will say in her defense that nobody is forcing people to use her web site; it is entirely voluntary. That would be true. But of course the same thing can be said about Google and Gmail too. -Declan PS: Google is considering changes to Gmail: http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5191028.html?tag=nefd.top _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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